President, mayor, police chief social worker. Trump is a man of many hats
Donald Trump's expansive view of his powers is no longer limited to those traditionally exercised by a president.
With his decision to take control of D.C. police and deploy national guardsmen and FBI agents on the city's streets − citing a spree of lawlessness that isn't supported by federal crime data − the president took charge of tasks typically in the domain of the mayor and the police chief.
There was more. He also vowed to clear out the homeless from encampments (though short on details about where they would go, exactly) as well as pave the streets and fill the potholes. He is a hands-on leader, he boasted, even when it comes to White House decor and his plans to build a huge ballroom and install new marble floors.
"I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse," he said at the beginning of a freewheeling news conference that stretched for more than an hour. "This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we're going to take our capital back."
Why now?
That wasn't entirely clear, especially at a time crime in Washington is on a significant slide.
In January, The U.S. attorney's office announced that violent crime in Washington in 2024 was at a 30-year low, down 35% from 2023. So far this year, DC's Metropolitan Police Department said that as of Aug. 10, violent crime has dropped another 26%.
Except for a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022 and 2023, violent crime in the District of Columbia has been steadily declining since 2012.
Trump was clearly unconvinced, depicting a dystopian landscape outside the White House gates. "Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people," he said.
He mentioned in particular the beating of a former staffer from the Department on Governmental Efficiency during an attempted carjacking. He suggested the reporters in the room, many of whom live in Washington, should be grateful that he was moving to protect them.
Can Trump do that? Yes. Should he?
Trump declared a public safety emergency in Washington − seizing control of the police department and sending 800 national guardsmen on the streets and another 120 FBI agents on night patrols. While critics argued that it wasn't necessary or wise to take these steps, they generally didn't argue that he lacked the power to do them.
"He's doing this because he can," city councilman Charles Allen said.
To be clear, standing on the side of law-and-order doesn't usually require a profile in courage. It has been a Republican trope since Richard Nixon and before. In recent years, it has been stoked by demands by Democrats and others for social-justice reforms in the wake of notorious cases of police brutality.
Trump depicted crime as a failure of Democratic leaders and a consequence of their policies. He warned other Democratic enclaves − New York, Chicago, Los Angeles − that he just might consider taking similar steps to impose order on their streets.
What particularly irked his fiercest critics was the contrast with Trump's action, or his lack of it, during what was undeniably a law-enforcement crisis in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. Thousands of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, disrupting the ceremonial count of Electoral College ballots in an election he had lost and sending senators and representatives scrambling for safety.
Then, Trump didn't deploy the National Guard. Afterwards, more than 1,575 people were charged with crimes. At least 600 were charged with the felony of assaulting or impeding law enforcement. Trump himself was also indicted on criminal charges for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election that he lost – a prosecution he managed to avoid facing trial on by winning the presidency again.
On the first day of his second term, Trump granted a blanket clemency to the Jan. 6 defendants.
Durban: 'Political theater' to draw attention from Jeffrey Epstein
This time, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin called Trump's actions "political theater" and "a typical move by this president to create chaos and uncertainty, and to draw the attention from other issues like Jeffrey Epstein." Trump was "trying to change the subject," said Durbin, one of the top Democrats who oversees the Justice Department.
Trump did answer questions from reporters about the traditional business of the presidency. He discussed his vision of a "land swap" he might negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their scheduled meeting on Aug. 15 in Alaska to end the war in Ukraine. He said he would soon decide whether to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, and he teased the ongoing trade negotiations with China.
Then, yes, there was Epstein, whose case had broken back into the headlines just before Trump walked out into the White House briefing room. A federal judge denied the Trump administration's request to release testimony in the grand jury that indicted Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's former partner who is serving her own 20-year prison sentence on sex trafficking charges.
The request was part of the tamp down swirling controversy among Trump's MAGA base about whether powerful people were being protected from disclosure.
As he left the briefing room, the president ignored shouted questions about the case − though like the new crackdown on crime, that topic isn't likely to go away anytime soon.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Fox News
a few seconds ago
- Fox News
CNN panel knocks 'look at the statistics' response from national Democrats on Trump's crime plan
A CNN panel suggested Monday that the "look at the statistics" response from some national Democrats on President Trump's crime plan might come across as "tone-deaf."
Vox
a few seconds ago
- Vox
Stop romanticizing the 1990s. The data shows today is better.
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. Let me introduce you to four of the most dangerous words in politics: 'the good old days.' Humans have a demonstrated tendency to remember the past as better than it actually was. It's called 'nostalgia bias,' and it can lead to us unfairly comparing the conditions of the present to some better imagined past. Memory, as the political scientist Lee Drutman wrote in a smart piece last year, is like a record store: It stocks both the hits and stinkers of the present, but only the hits of the past. 'The old days were full of stinkers, too,' he wrote. 'It's just nobody replays the stinkers.' Nostalgia bias has become a bigger and bigger part of our politics, thanks in part to President Donald Trump's largely successful ability to leverage a collective longing for a supposedly better past. (After all, it's called 'Make America Great Again,' not 'Make America Great.') But it's hardly the domain of one party: A 2023 survey from Pew found that nearly six in 10 respondents said that life in the US 50 years ago was better for people like them than it is today. Fifty years ago was the 1970s, and it doesn't take too much historical research to see how that decade doesn't match up to our happy memories. (One word: disco.) But what about a more recent, seemingly actually better decade? One that's suddenly surfing a wave of pop-culture nostalgia? A decade like…the 1990s? Related The surprising reason fewer people are dying from extreme weather One 2024 survey from CivicScience found that the 1990s were the single decade respondents felt most nostalgic for (while the most recent decade, the 2010s, finished dead last). Nor, to my surprise, is this just the product of aging Gen X-ers pining for their flannel-clad youth — another survey found that over a third of Gen Z-ers were nostalgic for the 1990s, despite the fact most of them had not yet been born then, while 61 percent of millennials felt the same way. But look closely, and you'll realize that our memories of the 1990s are fatally blurred by nostalgia. Here are four reasons why the 1990s weren't as good as the present day. 1) A far more violent country I've written before about how Americans have this stubborn habit of believing the crime is getting worse even when it's actually getting better. But holy cow, was America violent and murderous in the 1990s! 2) A much poorer world At the start of the 1990s, nearly 40 percent of the entire world was in a state of extreme poverty, living on $2.15 or less a day. What that meant in reality was that for almost half the world, life was lived on the edge of grinding subsistence, much as it had been for centuries, with seemingly little chance for change. In China, for instance, some two-thirds of the population was in extreme poverty. The idea that the world's largest nation would ever become rich would have been laughable. Today, as I've written before, that picture has utterly changed. Just 8.5 percent of the world's now much larger population lives in extreme poverty, which translates to over a billion people escaping near-total destitution. While you might want to go back in time to the 1990s, I can almost guarantee that none of them would. But it's not just the world. The 1990s may be remembered by some as one long economic boom in the US, but real GDP produced per person has increased by 40 percent since the end of the '90s, while real median income has increased by nearly 15 percent. Nostalgia doesn't take into account compound growth. 3) A nearly unchecked HIV pandemic There are countless ways in which health statistics globally have improved since the 1990s — the child mortality rate alone has fallen by 61 percent since 1990 — but the most striking one to me is HIV. At the dawn of the 1990s the HIV epidemic looked unbeatable: The US lost 31,196 people to AIDS in 1990, and by 1995 it was the leading killer of Americans aged 25-44. Global AIDS deaths were racing toward the 2-million-a-year mark, and even when the first truly effective multi-drug cocktail debuted in 1996, it reached only a tiny share of patients globally. Today the picture has flipped. About 30.7 million people — 77 percent of everyone with HIV — receive treatment, and global AIDS deaths have fallen to around 630,000. In 2022 there were fewer than 20,000 AIDS deaths in the US, and many cities are realistically aiming to zero out cases and deaths in the near future. There's even real hope for an effective vaccine. 4) A less tolerant, less educated population Though it might not seem like it in our highly polarized present moment, a number of important social attitudes have flipped since the Clinton years. When Gallup first asked in 1996, just 27 percent of Americans backed legal same-sex marriage; support now sits at 71 percent, and it has been legal throughout the country since 2015. In 1991, fewer than half of adults approved of Black-white marriages, yet by 2021 that share had rocketed to 94 percent. Together these shifts mark a dramatic expansion of everyday acceptance for LGBTQ people, interracial families, and other forms of diversity. As decades go, the 1990s did have a lot going for them, though as someone who was in their late teens and early 20s during much of them — precisely the ages we're most nostalgic for — you can't take my word for it. And our current moment has no shortage of problems, including some that 30 years ago we would have considered dead and buried. But don't let your inaccurate memories of the past distort your ability to see how far we've come. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
24 minutes ago
Republican Rep. LaMalfa hammered in profanity-laced town hall
Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa got an earful at an in-person town hall in Chico, California, Monday morning -- hearing it from attendees upset about his vote for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Epstein files and President Donald Trump's tariffs harming Californian farmers. "No fascism in America!" one man yelled as LaMalfa explained he was "in the room" on Jan. 6, attempting to reshape the narrative around the insurrection at the Capitol. "You need to be impeached!" the man said. "Put that finger down. That's really mature," LaMalfa said as another man apparently flipped him off. "Bull----!" the man continued to yell, calling out President Donald Trump's pardons for Jan. 6 rioters. Congressman Doug LaMalfa participates in a town hall meeting in Chico, Calif., Aug. 11, It didn't get any easier from there. Another woman talked about LaMalfa's vote for the "Bull---- bill," further pressing the congressman on his support for the president's immigration actions. "Newsom's doing a fine job of letting people out as it is," LaMalfa said, shifting blame to California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Many attendees let the congressman hear their profane commentary without ever posing a question to the seven-term lawmaker. "We have a question on this side?" a woman moderator asked. "F--- you!" another man yelled back. As LaMalfa attempted to justify his vote for Trump's so-called "big, beautiful bill," saying the reforms target "bad apples," he was booed -- then LaMalfa said Veterans Affairs funding would not be cut, prompting some attendees to call him a "liar." A woman drew applause from a number of attendees after defending federal funding for PBS and NPR. "This bill is not going to be the be-all, end-all on the whole Medicaid question," LaMalfa said. "It's not the end of the discussion." He then explained it targets "illegal immigrants" -- drawing more groans and boos. "Liar!" one man shouted again. Another called him an "---hole." Many in the crowd also demanded that LaMalfa support the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. On Monday, A federal judge in New York denied the Trump administration's motion to unseal grand jury testimony from the criminal case against Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. "What's interesting about the Epstein issue, is that it wasn't an issue during the Biden administration," LaMalfa quipped, drawing boos. He said that he's hoping that grand jury reports will be unsealed before Congress returns from recess in early September. "It's a bad look to have this information continue to be suppressed," he added, though he acknowledged the need to redact sensitive information. "You all left. The speaker of the House released you guys so you didn't have to deal with releasing the files," a woman told LaMalfa. "Everyone should be held accountable," LaMalfa said -- stressing people deserve due process -- drawing boos again. "Are people for due process?" LaMalfa wondered aloud as he was jeered. LaMalfa, who has a seat on the Agriculture Committee and is chairman of the subcommittee on forestry and horticulture, also was criticized for his support of Trump's global tariffs. "If you're not here to either offer your resignation, why aren't you here to apologize to the farmers of the North State because of your support for the Trump tariffs?" a man who identified himself as being from Chico said. "I'm not going to do either of those things," LaMalfa said, asking the audience to engage in a productive conversation. Despite the consistently disrespectful tenor of the town hall, LaMalfa kept his composure throughout the 75-minute event, never raising his voice or returning the invective he received. "We went past our time a little bit," LaMalfa said as he concluded the town hall. "I appreciate all your comments here," LaMalfa said as one man repeatedly shouted "F--- you, Doug!"
